World Magazine 2024
Table of Contents
Hard Drive Size Limitations and Barriers In Depth
As older legacy equipment is discarded in favor of today’s faster systems with tons of new technology, many of the older barriers will disappear. No doubt some of you will resurrect some of those old systems, and hopefully the information we have provided will enable you to resolve some of the barrier problems associated with them. Almost all of the problems we now face result either from a motherboard BIOS or operating system that hasn’t evolved as quickly as drive technology. Obviously the argument can be made that most of these problems are the result of shortsightedness on the part of developers of hard disk structures, access routines and operating systems. That argument is rather hollow given that many of today’s hardware and software bugs could not have been detected until hard disks grew in size exceeding some previously unknown limit or barrier. Fortunately, the solutions to most of these problems are coming nearly as fast as the problems themselves.
In discussing some of these recent barriers, we have provided a brief summary of the reasons for each of the barriers, as well as the drive capacity generally associated with it. The capacity limits are provided in both decimal (GB) and binary (GiB) formats, as most people look for specific decimal or binary numbers when identifying a particular barrier. For a complete discussion of the differences between decimal and binary measurements, see Binary v. Decimal Measurement.
Important: Most of the issues we will discuss here are BIOS related, and hence involve IDE/ATA hard disks rather than SCSI hard disks. Some, however, are equally relevant for SCSI drives, especially those that involve operating system limitations. Our primary focus is that of explaining the nature of the various hard disk barriers and how they arose. We won’t expand too much on how to resolve each of these barriers here, as the techniques are common to many different barrier types surfacing today.
Early Size Barriers and Limitations A Refresher
The first of the hard disk barriers was the 504 MB / 528 MB barrier that showed up some time in 1994. Though not widely known, there were a number of older capacity barriers that affected hard drives well before the 504/528 limit. They, however, never made it into print! These unpublished barriers received little attention for no other reason than there were no large groups of PC users as there are today, and developing technology was still in its infancy. As technology advanced, the associated upgrades were often the reason a particular barrier problem surfaced.
Although these earlier barriers have no relevance to modern computing, we felt they might be of interest to those of you who still have some of these older machines or a nostalgic interest. Since they have no impact today, our descriptions are brief.
- PC/XT Parameter (10.4 MiB / 10.9 MB) Barrier:The very first PC’s that used hard disk drives were the PC/XT units produced by IBM. These were specifically designed to use a particular type of disk with 312 cylinders, 4 heads and 17 sectors per track and pre-configured to approximately 10 MB in capacity.
- FAT12 Partition Size (16 MiB / 16.7 MB) Barrier:The first type of FAT format used for hard disks was that of the 12-bit FAT12 partition, which is still in use today for floppy disks. This type of FAT allows a maximum of 4,086 clusters of 4,096 bytes, for a total of 16,736,256 bytes per disk.
- DOS 3 (32 MiB / 33.6 MB) Barrier:When IBM introduced their PC AT product line, they were faced with the 16 MiB barrier from the previous design. In order to work around the barrier, they modified their operating system, DOS 3.x, adding support for the FAT16 file system. This, however, created yet another new barrier. Rather than look to the future, the FAT16 implementation was merely a work around to get past the immediate 16MiB barrier. The cluster size was set to 2,048 bytes, and only 16,384 FAT entries were allowed, fixing the maximum capacity at an approximate 32 MiB. While they did introduce the ability to have multiple partitions at about the same time, each partition could only be 32 MiB or less.
- DOS 4 (128 MiB / 134 MB) Barrier:
DOS 4.x was an improvement over DOS 3.x as it permitted 65,526 clusters instead of 16,384, increasing the maximum partition size to about 128 MiB. Unfortunately though, the cluster size was still fixed at 2,048 bytes.
It is evident that the majority of these early limitations did not arise because of BIOS issues, but rather some short-sightedness on the part of the DOS design team. They were barely staying a year or two ahead of the hard disk technology curve! In addition to the above barriers, there was also the 512 MiB barrier, caused by the change made in DOS version 5. This operating system change from DOS 4 allowed cluster sizes in a single partition to increase to 8,192 bytes, thereby allowing a theoretical maximum partition size of about 512 MiB or 537 MB. However, most systems that had drives large enough for this to be an issue were prevented from using the full size due to the slightly smaller 504 MiB / 528 MB BIOS barrier.
Current Size Barriers and Limitations
Although some of the early barriers we have presented thus far may appear old and irrelevant to those of you with new, or fairly new, computers, we assure you that not everyone has a fairly new computer and these barrier difficulties are extremely relevant. The information we have provided with respect to these barriers will allow you to focus on system problems that may arise out of nowhere without that might not appear barrier related.
The 1,024 Cylinder (504 MiB / 528 MB) Barrier
The most troubling of the hard disk barriers effecting standard IDE/ATA hard disks was the 504 MB limitation. This particular barrier began surfacing in systems in 1994. Given the larger hard disks available today, and the fact that this barrier occurred several years ago, its relevance is more historical than anything else. Many of you who are relatively new to personal computers, or at least the technical aspects of them, may not be aware of how troubling this large disk barrier was. It was a unique experience for users and technicians alike who believed that barrier limitations had been conquered.
As the result of this barrier, but only under certain circumstances, a hard disk with a size over 504 MB will appear as having only 504 MB. This results from the combination of the geometry-specification limitations of the IDE/ATA standard and the BIOS Int 13h standard. The 504 MB barrier is alternatively referred to as the 528 MB barrier, depending on whether you are looking at binary or decimal megabytes.
This barrier, and most of those that followed it that were entirely BIOS related, were eliminated in new BIOS firmware routines as out lined in a standards document released by the Technical Committee T13.
1226DT Enhanced BIOS Services for Disk Drives
Abstract: This technical report describes new services provided by BIOS firmware to support ATA hard disks up to 16 mega-tera-bytes (16×1018). Older BIOS services have a compatibility limit of 528 MB and a theoretical limit of 8.4 GB.
How does the BIOS in your computer know the size and parameters of the installed hard disk?
Simple, your BIOS asks the hard drive for the information, specifically its geometry. Each hard disk has the capability to disclose to the BIOS how many cylinders, heads and sectors that it has available for use. A hard disk is addressed through its geometry when a sector needs to be read from or written to, which is usually referred to as its logical geometry, and not the physical hardware geometry actually inside the hard disk assembly.
When you perform a drive parameter auto-detection in your systems BIOS setup or look in your new drives setup manual to see what the parameters are, what you see are the logical geometry values that the hard disk manufacturer has specified for the drive. Newer drives use zoned bit recording with ten or more values for sectors per track depending on which region of the disk is being examined, therefore it is not possible to set up the disk in the BIOS using the physical geometry. In addition, the BIOS has a limit of 63 sectors per track, and all newer hard disks average more than 100 sectors per track, so even without zoned bit recording, there would be a problem correctly recognizing the drive through its physical geometry.
Older hard disks have simple structures and low capacity, therefore they do not need special logical geometry. Their physical and logical geometry are the same. If you were to examine an older drive such as a 42.8 MB, which was very popular in early computers, its physical geometry consists of 820 cylinders, 6 heads, and 17 sectors, and those numbers are what is used by the system BIOS.
Newer drives cannot have their true geometries expressed using three simple numbers. To get around this issue, for disks 8.4 GB or smaller, the BIOS is provided with erroneous parameters that provide the approximate capacity of the disk. These parameters combined with an intelligent hard disk controller results in an automatic translation between the logical and physical geometry. The actual physical geometry is still different, but the BIOS is completely unaware of it.
Software systems reserve a certain amount of space for specifying each of the three parameters that make up the hard disk geometry. The amount of space reserved is dictated by standards that control how IDE/ATA hard disks are supposed to work, as well as how the BIOS interprets the hard disk through its Int13h software interface.
Unfortunately though, there has been little or no planning and coordination for the development and implementation of these standards as they are not universal by any means. Each one reserves a different set of numbers of bits for the disk geometry. In order to use an IDE/ATA hard disk with a standard BIOS disk routine, the limitations of both standards must be observed, which means that only the smaller of each geometry number can be used. Here is a look at how the two standards allocate bits for the geometry:
| Standard | Bits For Cylinder Number | Bits for Head Number | Bits for Sector Number | Total Bits for Geometry |
| IDE/ATA | 16 | 4 | 8 | 28 |
| BIOS Int 13h | 10 | 8 | 6 | 24 |
| Combination (Smaller of Each) | 10 | 4 | 6 | 20 |
Since each drive geometry figure is a binary number with a specific number of bits as indicated above, the maximum number supported for any parameter is 2^N, where N is the number in the table above. Therefore, when referring to the IDE/ATA standard, 2^16 or 65,536 cylinders are supported. We then multiply all the figures together to get a total number of sectors supported, and then multiply that result by 512 bytes (per sector) to get the maximum supported capacity. Here’s how they look after conversion.
| Standard | Maximum Cylinders | Maximum Heads | Maximum Sectors | Maximum Capacity |
| IDE/ATA | 65,536 | 16 | 256 | 128 GiB |
| BIOS Int 13h | 1,024 | 256 | 63 | 7.88 GiB |
| Combination (The smaller of each) | 1,024 | 16 | 63 | 504 MiB |
The BIOS Int 13h limit for sectors is 63, and not 64. By design, sectors are numbered starting at 1 and not 0.
Repeating what we have stated earlier, the 504 MiB figure is just 1,024 * 16 * 63 * 512, which equals 528,482,304. The problem is the combination of the limitations imposed by the two standards. Due to the 16-head limitation of IDE/ATA, no IDE hard disk is ever specified with more than 16 logical heads. Instead, they must always have a large number of cylinders in order to create a large capacity drive. Unfortunately, when you install one of these large capacity drives in a system with a standard, non-translating BIOS, the system can’t see more than 1,024 cylinders. There are several ways that a system may react to a drive too large for the legacy system. You can view the possibilities by clicking here.
The usual solution to the 504 MiB problem is to use a system (or motherboard) with a current BIOS that supports BIOS translation. However there are drive overlays that will work too! This provides a work-around for the problem by using what is little more than a software trick, but it does work. Software drive overlays, such as those made available by Maxtor and Western Digital, will also help you overcome the problem. When using drive overlays, be aware that they come with their own difficulties, therefore be careful and consider all of the implications. In our discussion, “Resolving Hard Drive Barriers and Limitations“, you will find an entire section devoted to resolving this barrier.
The 4,096 Cylinder (1.97 GiB / 2.11 GB) Barrier
As discussed in detail above with respect to the 504 MiB barrier, the basic problem with BIOS related capacity barriers is that the normal system (motherboard) BIOS interface on older computers is not designed to handle hard disks that employ cylinder counts above 1,024. Every hard disk made today uses more than 1,024 cylinders, which would cause a drastic reduction in available capacity due to this limitation.
Systems that use an enhanced BIOS are able to employ translation to get around the 1,024 cylinder limitation. However, some BIOS’s, in spite of their support of translation, will still choke if the number of cylinders exceeds 4,095. This results in the same 504 MiB barrier problem surfacing all over again. When you do the math, 2^12 is 4,096, which means that if you go beyond 4,095 cylinders on a drive, the number will require a 13th bit to properly represent it. As an example, 4,097 in decimal is 1000000000001 in binary. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, however some inexpensive (no cheap!) motherboards rely on poorly written BIOS code, which will result in only 12 bits of the cylinder number being recognized. The actual limitation is 4,096 * 16 * 63 * 512 bytes, which is approximately 1.97 binary gigabytes or 2.11 decimal gigabytes. Some BIOS’s evidencing this problem will show a disk with more than 4,096 cylinders as being 1.97 GB, while others will show it as substantially less. For example, 4,097 cylinders may show up as only 1 cylinder if the 13th bit is merely ignored and the lower-order 12 bits are used by alone!
Do not confuse this capacity barrier with the FAT 16 Partition Size (2.00 GiB / 2.15 GB) barrier (which is exactly 2 binary gigabytes) discussed next, as that limitation is purely a file system issue, and completely unrelated to the BIOS issue we are discussing here. This particular size barrier began surfacing on systems in 1996. There are several options available for resolving this barrier, which are similar to those used for the 504 MiB limitation. See Resolving BIOS and Drive Size Barriers.
The FAT16 Partition Size (2.00 GiB / 2.15 GB) Barrier
The 2 GiB capacity barrier is unlike most of the other barriers we have discussed thus far, as it is purely an operating system problem that has nothing at all to do with the BIOS. It is different than the 1.97 GiB barrier, as it is BIOS related. In many ways, it is similar to the early BIOS barriers that preceded the 504 MiB barrier as discussed at the beginning of this segment.
The 2 GiB capacity barrier is a limitation on the size of disk volumes in the FAT 16 file system. Due to the way that disks are set up using clusters, it is not possible to have more than 2 GiB in a single partition when using either the DOS, Windows 3.x or the early Windows 95 version “Windows 95A”. Under Windows NT, the limit is 4 GiB instead of 2 GiB when using FAT partitions.
NTFS partitions do not have this limitation!
Using 4 GiB FAT partitions under Windows NT requires the use of 64 kiB clusters. This is supported but non-standard, and will result in problems if you try to set up a system using other operating systems in addition to Windows NT.
We discuss all of these issues in our Operating Systems and their File Systems segment.
If you put a hard disk over 2 GiB into a machine that is using FAT 16 (16-bit FAT) under DOS, Windows 3.x or the first version of Windows 95, you can use all of the drive on the assumption that you haven’t been limited by one of the other BIOS related barriers mentioned above or in our “Basics” segment. To access the full contents of the disk, however, you must create several partitions. This limitation is a function of the operating system, and it affects IDE/ATA and SCSI hard disks equally.
This limitation does not apply to disks formatted using the later FAT 32 file system. FAT 32 is an enhancement created specifically to avoid this problem, and was first introduced in Windows 95 OEM SR2, (the second version of Windows 95). It is supported in Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. There is also the NTFS file system, supported by Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, which uses a completely different set of structures and can have truly enormous partitions. Review our segment on NTFS, the “New Technology File System“.
The 6,322 Cylinder (3.04 GiB / 3.26 GB) Barrier
The 3.04 GiB/3.26 GB barrier is one of the more obscure of the size barriers that you will find, as it affects only a small percentage of computer systems. On these particular systems, the BIOS cannot handle hard disk geometry having more than 6,322 cylinders. Setting cylinder value higher than 6,322 causes the system to hang. This barrier fixes the capacity on affected systems to about 3.04 GiB or 3.26 GiB, 6322 cylinders * 16 heads * 63 sectors * 512 bytes. Oddly enough, there’s no apparent significance to the 6,322 number, as it isn’t a round number in either decimal or binary.
Solving this barrier is usually accomplished by either updating the BIOS or replacing the motherboard. In some cases, a drive mask can be used such as those available from Maxtor and Western Digital.
The Phoenix BIOS 4.03 / 4.04 Bug (3.05 GiB / 3.28 GB) Barrier
This is another of the rather obscure size barriers, however this one that differs from the others described thus far. This particular barrier differs as it isn’t the result of poor or inadequate BIOS design, nor as the result of an operating system characteristic or limitation. This particular limitation is the result of a programming error or a bug in a few types of systems manufactured during the mid 1990s. Some systems that used the Phoenix BIOS, specifically versions 4.03 or 4.04, have a problem with the BIOS routine that calculates hard disk drive sizes. BIOS code is initially written by the BIOS maker, and subsequently specifically tailored by system or motherboard manufacturers. The obscure nature of this barrier is due to the fact that not all implementations of these BIOS versions may have this bug while others may.
This is not only a difficult barrier to diagnose, but it is also very difficult to resolve. The barrier actually isn’t a single value, and appears to depend on the values of the geometry parameters. Its behavior can be different based on the values entered. If you were to use standard IDE head and sector values of 16 and 63 respectively, the cylinder field can have a maximum value of 6,349 without any problems, resulting in a maximum capacity of 3.05 GiB or 3.28 GB. If you were to change the cylinder value to a value between 6,350 and 8,322, the BIOS setup program may lock up. If you were to use cylinder values of 8,323 to 14,671, the displayed drive size is incorrect. Phoenix seems to have corrected this problem in subsequent versions of this BIOS code.
The 8,192 Cylinder (3.94 GiB / 4.22 GB) Barrier
After the discovery of the 504 MiB BIOS barrier, the resolution of the problem was to make use of BIOS geometry translation. This method continued until hard drives exceeded about 8 GB in size and the whole IDE/ATA geometry scheme had to be abandoned altogether. Translation works by dividing the number of cylinders or a hard drive by a binary number such as 2, 4, 8 or 16, and then multiplying the number of heads by the same number. While this allows the number of cylinders the BIOS sees fall below the Int13h limit of 1,024, it also causes a problem in some systems when using a hard disk of 4 GB or greater in size.
To understand how translation causes this particular new barrier to arise, you need to understand how BIOS translation works. Click here for an explanation of BIOS Translation.
When the number of cylinders on the drive is between 8,192 and 16,383, the typical number used for translation is 16. Using a theoretical 6.4 GB hard disk with a typical IDE/ATA specification, 16 heads and 63 sectors per track:
| Cylinders | Heads | Sectors | Capacity | |
| IDE/ATA Limits | 65,536 | 16 | 256 | 137 GB |
| Hard Disk Logical Geometry | 12,496 | 16 | 63 | 6.45 GB |
| BIOS Translation Factor | divide by 16 | multiply by 16 | — | — |
| BIOS Translated Geometry | 781 | 256 | 63 | 6.45 GB |
| BIOS Int 13h Limits | 1,024 | 256 | 63 | 7.88 GB |
Theoretically, this should work just fine, as it overcomes the BIOS issues and results in a geometry that falls within acceptable parameters. Unfortunately a problem arose when drives began exceeding 8,192 cylinders during the 1997-98 time period. MS-DOS and early versions of Windows choke when presented with a drive that had 256 heads. Hence, this barrier is caused by both the operating system and the system BIOS. The operating system should have been able to easily handle 256 heads, however the BIOS was creating the problem because of the geometry translation.
The simplest way to resolve this problem would have been to change the way the BIOS does translation. As a result, BIOS’s stopped creating translated geometries that had 256 heads. One method used was to use 15 as the translation factor instead of 16, resulting in this sort of conversion:
| Cylinders | Heads | Sectors | Capacity | |
| IDE/ATA Limits | 65,536 | 16 | 256 | 137 GB |
| Hard Disk Logical Geometry | 12,496 | 16 | 63 | 6.45 GB |
| BIOS Translation Factor | divide by 15 | multiply by 15 | — | — |
| BIOS Translated Geometry | 833 | 240 | 63 | 6.45 GB |
| BIOS Int 13h Limits | 1,024 | 256 | 63 | 7.88 GB |
Of course, if you have a BIOS that doesn’t know about the 256 head problem, you will need to address this with either a hardware or software solution. In order to avoid some of these problems, many hard disk manufacturers changed their specified geometries to use only 15 heads instead of 16. So instead of the example drive above being specified with 12,496 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors, it might have been 13,329 cylinders, 15 heads and 63 sectors. With these parameters, even if the BIOS used a translation factor of 16, the resulting number of heads would only be 240.
The 240 Head Int 13 Interface (7.38 GiB / 7.93 GB) Barrier
The Interrupt (Int) 13h interface limit normally restricts some systems to 7.88 GiB or 8.46 GiB as a result of the limits of the BIOS Int13h interface, 1,024 cylinders, 256 heads and 63 sectors of 512 bytes. This issue is covered more fully immediately below. In some systems, however, the Int13h interface restriction results in a smaller limit of only 7.38 GiB or 7.93 GB.
The reason behind this occurrence though is related to an entirely different barrier problem. As described in the discussion of the 8,192 cylinder limit above, DOS and some early Windows?/sup> versions cannot properly handle geometry translations that specifies 256 heads. BIOS and motherboard developers, in order to work around this issue, change the translation method so that only 240 heads are presented to the operating system. While this does fix the 256 head problem, it reduces the drive capacity. In spite of this work around, the 1,024 cylinder and 63 sector restrictions remain, but with only 240 heads. The maximum drive capacity becomes 1024 * 240 * 63 = 15,482,880 sectors of 512 bytes, or 7,927,234,560 bytes. In reality, there’s little difference in how this standard Interrupt 13h problem is resolved. Remember, you still need to use Int13h extensions, which are given a little more depth in the next section.
The Int 13 Interface (7.88 GiB / 8.46 GB) Barrier
This barrier is often characterized merely as the 8 GB barrier, however it is one of the most important barriers facing the small system builder and those upgrading their computer system. There’s no hiding the fact that today’s hard disk capacities have surpassed the 100GB mark and moving beyond that quickly. This particular barrier, based upon its influence upon system builders and those doing upgrades, is very much like the early 528MB barrier that suddenly got everyone’s attention. This particular barrier usually surfaces when system builders or end-users attempt to upgrade systems built during the late 1990s that had hard disks of 1 GB to 4 GB in size.
Similar to many of the other drive barriers, this one is also BIOS related, although its somewhat tougher to resolve as it involves the traditional limits imposed by how hard disks are used in personal computers along with the Interrupt 13h interface. That standard allocates 10 bits for the cylinder number, with a maximum of 1,024 cylinders, 8 bits for the head number, with a maximum of 256, and 6 bits for the sector number, with a maximum of 63 (the number 0 is not used). When you multiply these together, presuming the standard of 512 bytes per sector, the result is the maximum of 8,455,716,864 bytes. This is the largest hard disk size that can be addressed using the standard Int13h interface.
Unfortunately there is no translation available that can resolve this because it doesn’t result from a combination of limitations like the earliest 504 MiB barrier. Factually it is a limitation imposed as the result of how hard disks are represented using the BIOS Interrupt 13h routines used by DOS and other applications to access the hard disk. In order to resolve this particular problem we need to move beyond the “standard Int13h routines and move on to the enhanced Int13h extensions in the motherboards BIOS.
Don’t be misled by the confusion between standard and enhanced interrupt 13h extensions. Enhanced Int13h extensions require full support from both the BIOS and the operating system. Most older operating systems do not support Int13h extensions, and as far as we know there are no plans of providing them. All versions of non-Windows?/sup> DOS, such as 6.22 and earlier, as well as Windows NT version 3.5 do not support Int13h extensions and cannot use hard disks over 8.4 GB in size.
As we have mentioned on a number of occasions throughout this segment, BIOS developers are not solely responsible for some of these limitations. After a BIOS is developed and delivered to a motherboard manufacturer, it is often modified even further for proprietary reason known only to the motherboard manufacturer. Some systems have a smaller Int13h capacity limit due to the use of modified translation to avoid presenting geometry with 256 heads to the operating system. You can review this information again by clicking here for the details.
The Windows 95 and the 29.8 GiB / 32.0 GB Barrier
If you have done any research at all regarding this alleged barrier, you probably took note of the fact that there has been quite a bit of discussion about this barrier by a large number of reasonably savvy tech oriented web sites. Many of these tech sites espouse that in 1999 Microsoft announced that Windows?/sup> 95 would not be supporting hard disks beyond 32 GB in size as one of the reason for the barrier, some going as far as to blame Microsoft directly. Their statements, and their assumptions, are very broad and very inaccurate.
While it is true that Microsoft announced that they had no plans to support FAT 32 in the first version of Windows?/sup>, version 95A, there is support in last Windows?/sup> 95 OSR2 version, as well as Windows?/sup> 98 and Windows?/sup> ME. It is because of this erroneous information that we have decided to include this perceived barrier (for lack of a better description) in our Drive Size Barrier segment.
In order for Microsoft to provide support for FAT 32 in Windows?/sup> 95A, the kernel would have to be rewritten, among other things. In addition, Windows?/font> 95A is still entirely reliant on MS-DOS?/sup> version 6.22, which does not support FAT 32, and like Windows?/sup> NT, it cannot see FAT 32 volumes. Beyond this, and except for test computers, most personal computers that have Windows?/sup> 95A installed have other limitations, such as standard Int13h disk access instead of support for Int13h Extensions. No doubt there would be a multitude of other BIOS related restrictions as well. Follow this link to review Microsoft’s Knowledge Base Article on the subject: Q246818 Windows 95 Does Not Support Hard Disks Larger Than 32 GB.
First and foremost, this is not a 32GB issue, but rather a FAT 32 issue, and even saying that is a stretch. Here’s some information that may assist you with this issue. This limitation involves the operating system itself, old MS-DOS?/sup> issues, BIOS limitations, drive geometry as well as other factors. As you read through the following, you will better understand some of the problems.
The following limitations exist using the FAT32 file system with Windows operating systems:
- Clusters cannot be 64 kilobytes (KB) or larger. If clusters were 64 KB or larger, some programs (such as Setup programs) might calculate disk space incorrectly.
- A volume must contain at least 65,527 clusters to use the FAT32 file system. You cannot increase the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that it ends up with less than 65,527 clusters.Nike Women’s Minnesota Vikings Historic Logo Tri-Blend Tonal Logo T-Shirt,Youth New England Patriots Danny Amendola Nike Navy Team Color Game Jersey http://www.cheap-arizona-cardinals-jerseys.com.Minnesota Vikings Women’s Cheer Bowler purse – Natural,Men’s Pittsburgh Steelers Antigua Black Century Polo,Denver Broncos Black Rim Basic Clock Arizona Cardinals Jerseys Sale.Riddell Seattle Seahawks Replica Mini Helmet,Toddler Philadelphia Eagles Midnight Green Team Logo Fleece Pullover Hoodie Arizona Cardinals Jerseys Sale.Mens Baltimore Ravens Joe Flacco Majestic Purple Hashmark II T-Shirt,Infant Miami Dolphins Cutlery Set.Detroit Lions Motorcycle Wheel Spinner,Women’s New England Patriots Levi’s Navy Denim Varsity Jacket.Men’s Oakland Raiders Pro Line Black Taylor Stretch Fit Hat,San Francisco 49ers Black Roadblock Duffle Bag Cheap Arizona Cardinals Football Jerseys For Sale.Infant Jacksonville Jaguars Gray Horizon Bodysuit & Pant Set -,Oakland Raiders Wilson “The Duke” Official Size Replica Game Football Cheap Arizona Cardinals Football Jerseys For Sale.Detroit Lions Chrome Can Tumbler,New Orleans Saints Retro Drawstring Backpack,Mens Atlanta Falcons Red Tri-Blend Vintage Tank Top
- The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).
- The ScanDisk tool included with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98 is a 16-bit program. Such programs have a single memory block maximum allocation size of 16 MB less 64 KB. Therefore, The Windows 95 or Windows 98 ScanDisk tool cannot process volumes using the FAT32 file system that have a FAT larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size. A FAT entry on a volume using the FAT32 file system uses 4 bytes, so ScanDisk cannot process the FAT on a volume using the FAT32 file system that defines more than 4,177,920 clusters (including the two reserved clusters). Including the FATs themselves, this works out, at the maximum of 32 KB per cluster, to a volume size of 127.53 gigabytes (GB).
- You cannot decrease the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that the FAT ends up larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size.
- When attempting to format a FAT32 partition larger than 32 GB, the format fails near the end of the process with the following error: “Logical Disk Manager: Volume size too big.”Courtesy Microsoft Knowledge Base Article Q184006.
Windows 2000 Specific Issues:
- Setup Does Not Check for INT-13 ExtensionsCourtesy Microsoft Knowledge Base Article Q240672
- You cannot format a volume larger than 32 GB in size using the FAT32 file system in Windows 2000. The Windows 2000 FastFAT driver can mount and support volumes larger than 32 GB that use the FAT32 file system (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create one using the Format tool. This behavior is by design. If you need to create a volume larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system instead. NOTE: When attempting to format a FAT32 partition larger than 32 GB, the format fails near the end of the process with the following error: “Logical Disk Manager: Volume size too big.”Courtesy Microsoft Knowledge Base Article Q184006.
Windows XP Specific Issues:
- You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. Windows XP can mount and support FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB by using the Format tool during Setup. If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it. Another option is to start from a Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) Startup disk and use the Format tool included on the disk.Courtesy Microsoft Knowledge Base Article Q314463.
The 65,536 Cylinder (31.5 GiB / 33.8 GB) Barrier
This barrier is relatively recent, and along with a couple of others began showing up during the spring and summer of 1999. Although this barrier is often referred to as the 32 GB barrier similar to the one immediately above, that description is a bit of a misnomer.
This particular barrier is caused by some versions of the Award BIOS not being able to handle drives having more than 65,535 cylinders. Most hard disk parameters use 16 heads and 63 sectors, which works out to a capacity of approximately 33.8 GB or 31.5 GiB. It is our understanding that on or about June of 1999, this problem had been corrected by Award. This is somewhat of an unusual barrier given that most, if not all, hard disks above 8 GB no longer use discrete geometry for access, instead Logical Block Addressing is used along with a flat sector number from 0 to one less than the number of sectors on the drive. No doubt this 65,536 cylinder problem must somehow be related to some older code that was being used, or a compatibility issue with older hard drives (or both). From everything we have been able to examine, this issue was limited to a few machines that relied upon old Award BIOS code that was subsequently corrected with an update.
The Windows 98/98SE 64GB Barrier
This barrier is often mischaracterized as a Windows?/sup> 95/98/SE barrier, when in fact it is not a limitation of the operating system at all. Rather, the barrier (a limitation actually) is caused by the use of an old version of Microsoft’s disk setup tools, Fdisk.exe and Format.com.
When you use Fdisk.exe to partition a hard disk that is larger than 64 GB (64 gigabytes, or 68,719,476,736 bytes) in size, Fdisk does not report the correct size of the hard disk. The size that Fdisk reports is the full size of the hard disk minus 64 GB. For example, if the physical drive is 70.3 GB (75,484,122,112 bytes) in size, Fdisk reports the drive as being 6.3 GB (6,764,579,840 bytes) in size.
The reason for this is that Fdisk uses some 16-bit values internally to calculate the size of the drive. Some of these variables overflow when the drive size is equal to or larger than 64 GB. Microsoft has made a fix available for this problem, which is an updated version of Fdisk.exe.
The new file information is as follows:
| File Date | Time Stamp | File Size | File Name | Windows Version |
| 05/19/00 | 10:30AM | 64,428 | Fdisk.exe | Windows 98 |
| 05/18/00 | 08:35AM | 64,460 | Fdisk.exe | Windows 98 SE |
You can read more about this issue in the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article titled: Q263044 – Fdisk Does Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB.
You can download the new Fdisk.exe from either of these links:
Download Fdisk.exe directly from Microsoft (English)
You can download Fdisk.exe from our servers (English)
The FAT 32 Limitation (124.55 GiB / 127.53)
Although many of the limitations imposed by the FAT 32 file system are outlined above, this particular limitation is actually imposed by one of the disk tools included with Microsoft Windows?/sup> 95, 98 and Windows?/sup> Millennium Edition.
- The ScanDisk tool included with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98 is a 16-bit program. Such programs have a single memory block maximum allocation size of 16 MB less 64 KB. Therefore, The Windows 95 or Windows 98 ScanDisk tool cannot process volumes using the FAT32 file system that have a FAT larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size. A FAT entry on a volume using the FAT32 file system uses 4 bytes, so ScanDisk cannot process the FAT on a volume using the FAT32 file system that defines more than 4,177,920 clusters (including the two reserved clusters). Including the FATs themselves, this works out, at the maximum of 32 KB per cluster, to a volume size of 127.53 gigabytes (GB).
There are no fixes or work-arounds for this issue!
For further information, see: Microsoft Knowledge Base Article Q184006.
The ATA Interface Limit (128 GiB / 137 GB) Barrier
In order to avoid previous disk barriers and limitations, other than those imposed by the operating systems themselves, today’s hard drives no longer rely upon discrete geometry (specific cylinder, head and sector numbers) and instead use logical block addressing and a sector number. Unfortunately, even when we move away from bit addressing in favor of head and sector numbers, we still reach the limit of our ability to address all of the bits when taken together. Let’s take a look at the ATA interface. There are 28 bits used for the sector number interface with the operating system, BIOS and the hard disk. This means a hard disk can have a maximum of 2^28 or 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes, placing the ATA interface maximum at 128 GiB or approximately 137.4 GB.
As little as one or two years ago, no one thought there would be hard drives exceeding 137.4 GB. However, as many of you have seen, hard drive capacity surpassed this mark when Maxtor released their DiamondMax Plus 540X at 160 GB on October 29, 2001. Of course, Maxtor’s release of a drive at 160 GB caught many techno-geeks off guard. How could they possibly make these huge drives work? Maxtor considered the 137 GB barrier well before releasing the drive as part of an entirely new initiative to take storage capacities into the petabyte region. To conquer the 137GB barrier, when Maxtor released their new drive, they made a new Ultra ATA/133 PCI adapter card available as part of the package. Believe it or not, for a limited period, the add-in card was “free”. The adapter itself, however, was Maxtor’s method of bringing these new drives to market and in the process temporarily solving the barrier problem without requiring users to purchase new computers to handle the new technology.
Significant changes have occurred to the ATA interface between the hard disk and the rest of the computer system in less than a year, and more are in the making. One entity charged with the responsibility of developing the new standards for this interface (and its changes) is Technical Committee T13. It is responsible for the coordination and development of all interface standards relating to the popular AT Attachment (ATA) storage interface utilized on most personal and mobile computers today. A few years ago a number of different proposals to expand ATA addressing from 28 bits to either 48 or 64 bits were made, and over those few years the committee examined each very closely. Either of these technology changes would permit huge drive sizes. The first to surface, however, was 48 bit addressing and delivered in the form of a hard drive at 160 GB by Maxtor. Using 48-bits like Maxtor takes drive sizes 100,000 times higher than current limits. This is most definitely a signal of what lies ahead!
Solution:
Due to BIOS limitations as well as those unique to Windows?/sup>, partitioning and formatting drives larger than 137 Gigabytes without proper driver or controller support will result in data loss when storing data to the drive beyond the 137 GB Barrier.
In order for you system to recognize more than 137 GB you will need to utilize one of the following recommended solutions:
- If you have a motherboard that has a Intel chipset (810, 810E, 810E2, 815, 815, 815E, 815EP, 815P, 820, 820E, 830M, 830MP, 830MG, 840, 845, 850, or 860) please visit Intel’s web site and download the Intel Application Accelerator. Intel’s Application Accelerator supports the full capacity of drives larger than 137 GB.
- If you do not have a motherboard that has a Intel chipset then it is recommended that you purchase an Ultra ATA 133 PCI card that supports 48 bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA). You can purchase the Maxtor Ultra ATA 133 PCI Card, which supports drives that are larger than 137 GB, directly from us or your local distributor.
If you do not follow either of the above steps, and you attempt to use a drive that exceeds 137 GB and/or that relies on 48-bit Logical Block Addressing by attempting to “tweak” the system even though your ATA controller, chipset drivers and/or system BIOS do not properly support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing, data loss will occur when storing data to the drive beyond the barrier.
What the future holds!
Although in development for quite some time, you might want to take a look at Serial ATA as the next major development in hard drive technology.
How a BIOS handles Oversized Hard Disks
When you install a hard disk into a computer system that is larger than that which the BIOS is capable of handling, the system may react in a number of different ways, most of which are predictable. How a particular system responds though, will depend largely on the system, the BIOS date, and the overall quality of the BIOS routines. Most, if not all, issues noted below occur as the result of the hard disk having a total cylinder count larger than the maximum supported by the BIOS.
These are the four most common reactions you may expect with a machine having an older BIOS and a hard disk larger than it is capable of supporting, listed in the order of probability.
Truncation: A BIOS, when presented with a logical geometry containing more cylinders than it can handle, will simply truncate the total number of cylinders to the maximum it can support. You will usually experience this in an older BIOS that doesn’t support more than 1,024 cylinders, or in some cases in a BIOS with a set maximum of 4,096 cylinders. This is commonly found in systems that do not support Int13h extensions, as these systems typically see drives larger than 8.4 GB as being just 8.4 GB in size. Although truncation defeats the purpose behind adding a larger hard disk, the risk of losing data is minimal to nonexistent, and preferable to the other possibilities outlined below.
Wrap-Around:
Many an old BIOS will presume that the number of cylinders in a drive will always be 1,024 or below, and therefore will only look to the bottom 10 bits of the cylinder number reported by the hard disk (2^10 = 1,024). As a result, when drives report cylinders over 1,023, the BIOS counts up to 1,024 and then wraps around to zero and starts over. As an example, let’s presume for the moment that you have purchased a brand new 60 GB hard drive for your computer. For the purposes of this example, we’ll presume this new drive was manufactured by Maxtor and it has 119,150 actual cylinders. Even in a recent manufactured computer you could only manually enter a maximum of 16,383 with current ATA specifications. In this scenario, the BIOS would only see 366 cylinders. This is because the BIOS would count up to 1,024 one hundred and sixteen (116) times to yield 118,784, or wrap around 116 times, ending with a net 366 cylinders (119,150 minus 118,784 = 366).
A nearly identical scenario can occur with a BIOS that supports only 4,096 cylinders, as it will only look at the bottom 12 bits. A troubling problem surfaced only a few years ago when computers began upgrading storage in older systems with small (by today’s standards) 2.5 GB hard disks only to learn that they had only about 400 MB of usable space showing up. Unfortunately, this was a common failure in systems that had a BIOS that didn’t support more than 4,096 cylinders.
Even some BIOS’s that support translation may wrap the cylinders if you disable translation. When you re-enable translation the problem may go away.
BIOS Ignorance: This is truly an ugly issue. Some systems with an older BIOS correctly reports the true number of logical cylinders of the drive, making you think the motherboard and BIOS (your system) supports the full size of the hard disk. In reality, the BIOS doesn’t have a clue as to the number of cylinders or what to do with them. It’s actually just reporting what the drive reports. When you attempt to partition and format the hard disk, you’re faced with the stark reality of a 1.024 cylinder limitation, but this is not readily evident. It can have you chasing your tail for hours trying to determine what is wrong. Fortunately though, this is only seen in systems with an older BIOS and the 1,024 cylinder limitation.
BIOS Failure: While you may not view it this way, a BIOS failure when attempting to install a large hard disk in a system with a BIOS that doesn’t support is probably a very fortunate situation. Obviously no one wants to deal with a barrier when upgrading their computer, but this particular failure might save you hours of searching for the reason for the failure. Many times and older BIOS will cause the system to completely lock up if you try installing a hard disk larger than can be supported. While fairly uncommon, it does occur with the more proprietary computer systems where the manufacturer withholds accurate BIOS and disk support information. Often you will experience this with some of the larger hard disk barriers and also with some of the more obscure ones.
What will be the next barrier?
While it is true that the ATA/ATAPI-6 standard defines a method to provide a total capacity for a device of 144 petabytes, the next limit will be imposed not by the ATA devices but by many of the popular operating systems in use today. This limit will be at 2.2 terabytes (2,200 gigabytes). This barrier exists because many of today’s operating systems are based on 32-bit addressing. These operating systems include many flavors of Linux, Mac OS 9.x, and Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4, 2000, and XP (Windows XP/64-bit also has the limit because of leveraged 32-bit code).
This barrier could be real as early as 2004 if current hard drive capacity rate increases continue along the same growth trends of today.
This concludes our segment of drive barriers and limitations. If you feel that we have missed something, or that a barrier or limitation has been overlooked, please write us and tell us about it.
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